Occupational Risk Assessment

What occupational risk assessment means

Occupational risk assessment (تقييم المخاطر المهنية), also called workplace risk assessment, is the systematic examination of a working environment and of the tasks carried out in it, in order to identify what could harm a worker, to estimate how likely that harm is and how severe its effect would be, and to set in order the measures that will bring it under control.

The word assessment carries more than one meaning in human resources. In job evaluation, of which job classification is one approach, it means ordering jobs by their relative weight for the purposes of pay. In performance appraisal, it means a judgement on an employee’s work. Occupational risk assessment is neither of these. It assesses the hazard, not the person and not the job, and its output is a preventive measure, not an administrative decision about an employee.

The difference matters in practice because the three exercises can sit in the same department and use similar forms. A completed job evaluation tells an organisation where a role sits on the pay scale, and a completed appraisal tells it how a person has performed. Neither tells it whether the people doing the work can be hurt by it, and neither produces the list of controls that an occupational risk assessment ends with.

Occupational risk assessment and the Saudi Labor Law

In the consolidated text of the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, we did not find the expression risk assessment, and we found no provision that describes it as a standalone procedure. What the Labor Law does contain are the duties that an occupational risk assessment presupposes and builds on:

• Article 122 of the Labor Law. It requires the employer to take the necessary precautions to protect workers from the hazards and diseases arising from the work and from the machinery used. Describing a precaution as necessary presupposes that the hazard it answers is known first.
• Article 123 of the Labor Law. It is written in two sentences. In the first, before the worker starts work, the employer must inform the worker of the hazards of their occupation and oblige them to use the protective means prescribed for it. In the second, which carries no such timing, the employer must provide suitable personal protective equipment for the workers and train them in its use. The duty to inform the worker of the hazards is stated in the text, and it cannot be met without first listing those hazards.
• Article 130 of the Labor Law. It requires employers, in coordination with the Ministry, to determine the status of their establishments against the controls that the Ministry sets under Article 129 of the Labor Law for identifying major hazard establishments. This is the nearest the Labor Law comes to a mandatory assessment that the employer carries out of its own establishment. It sits in the chapter that Article 127 of the Labor Law applies to major hazard establishments, so it is confined to that category and does not extend to every establishment.

Article 121 of the Labor Law refers the rules, procedures and levels of protection, safety and occupational health to a decision of the Minister. In the sources we reviewed, we did not locate that decision. As a result, we found no official method of occupational risk assessment whose text is established, and the structure set out further down is a professional working framework, not a statutory requirement attributed to any Article.

The same gap applies to scoring. We found no official scoring matrix for occupational risk assessment attributed to the Labor Law, since the levels are referred to a decision we did not locate. A matrix of scores presented as the statutory requirement attributes to the text something that is not in it.

Royal Decree M/44, which amended the Labor Law with effect from 19 February 2025, did not amend Articles 121 to 124 or Articles 127 to 130 of the Labor Law. None of those Articles carries an amendment note from that decree in the consolidated text published by the Ministry.

The rule that places occupational risk assessment ahead of the medical examination

The regulation on occupational fitness examinations and noncommunicable diseases (لائحة فحوصات اللياقة المهنية والأمراض غير المعدية) was issued by Ministerial Decision 33232 dated 11/3/1447H. Its procedural guide (الدليل الإجرائي), issued under Article 20 of that regulation, bars establishments from using the occupational fitness examination as a substitute for applying the preventive controls in the hierarchy of controls (نظام السيطرة التسلسلي). The guide describes the medical examination as a means of monitoring, not of prevention.

That rule puts occupational risk assessment in its proper place. An establishment that examines its workers and records their results, but does not remove the hazard at its source, has measured the effect without preventing its cause. A worker found fit at the start of the year can still be exposed to the same dust, noise or load for the rest of it, and a later examination can record the consequence but cannot stop it.

The hierarchy of controls to which the rule refers is ordered, in professional practice, as follows: eliminate the hazard, then substitute something less harmful, then control it by engineering means, then control it by administrative means, and only then rely on personal protective equipment. That order comes from professional practice. In the passage of the guide recorded in our sources, the hierarchy is named but its levels are not listed. Personal protective equipment stands at the end of the order, not at its start, even though it is visible on site and simple to buy.

What makes an occupational risk assessment usable

The five points below are a professional working framework, not an approved technical standard. Each one addresses a way in which an assessment can exist on paper and still fail to protect anyone.

1. The unit of assessment is the task, not the job. One employee can carry out tasks whose risks differ, and an assessment attached to the job title can miss them. A warehouse employee may move stock with a forklift in the morning, lift boxes by hand at midday and enter data at a desk in the afternoon. A single line under the title warehouse employee cannot describe all three.
2. The hazard is kept separate from its likelihood. A hazard is what could cause harm, and likelihood is an estimate of whether that harm will happen. Mixing the two produces a list that cannot be put in order. A store of chemicals in sealed containers can carry a severe hazard with a low likelihood, while a loose cable across a walkway can carry a minor hazard with a high one, and the two call for different responses.
3. Every measure has an owner and a date. An assessment that ends in a recommendation with no name and no deadline is a document, not a plan.
4. It is reviewed whenever something changes. The occasions are new equipment, machines or devices, a change in the working environment, and the occurrence of an accident. These are the same occasions that the occupational fitness regulation and its guide treat as grounds for an examination outside the periodic schedule.
5. The worker’s circumstances form part of the assessment. A new worker, a worker returning after a long absence, and a worker assigned a task outside their usual work can each face a risk that the same task does not pose to a colleague used to it.

How occupational risk assessment shapes the timing of medical examinations

The procedural guide sets examinations to be repeated every three years for all occupations classified as high risk, unless the specialist occupational physician or the Council (المجلس) determines otherwise on the basis of the nature of the occupation and the assessment and analysis of risks. The guide makes periodic examinations mandatory for those occupations. For all other occupations, the guide provides that the periodic examination is carried out at regular intervals according to the nature of the occupation and the assessment and analysis of risks.

So for occupations outside the high risk class, the guide ties the interval of the periodic examination to the risk assessment itself, and gives that interval no number. Applying the three years to all employees takes a figure limited to one class and carries it outside that class. Within the high risk class, too, the three years applies unless the occupational physician or the Council sets something different.

The guide also leaves the classification itself open. In the sources we reviewed, we found no published list of the occupations classified as high risk: the guide refers that classification to the Council and to the risk assessment. An occupational risk assessment is therefore one of the inputs to the question of which examinations a worker needs and how frequently, not only a record of the hazards at a workstation.

Occupational risk assessment and the worker’s duty

An occupational risk assessment does not transfer responsibility to the worker. Article 124 of the Labor Law requires the worker to use the protective means assigned to each operation, to preserve them and to carry out the instructions laid down to protect their health and to guard against injury and disease. The same Article of the Labor Law requires the worker to refrain from any act or omission that prevents those instructions from being carried out, or that misuses or disables the means provided to protect the workplace and the health and safety of colleagues.

That duty stands independently, but it is not a substitute for the employer’s duties under Articles 122 and 123 of the Labor Law. A worker cannot use protective means that were never provided, or follow instructions about a hazard that was never identified.

An establishment can assign the follow up of the measures in its assessment to a health and safety officer or to a safety committee. Neither arrangement moves the duty away from the employer, to whom Articles 121 to 123 of the Labor Law are addressed. Where harm does occur despite the assessment, the case is dealt with under the rules on work injury.

An occupational risk assessment describes the work as it was when it was assessed. It stays useful only while someone reviews it each time the tasks, the equipment or the people doing the work change.

This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Safety Committee
• Health and Safety Officer
• Physical Ability Test
• Work Injury
• Hazard Pay